Sir Richard Leese: We're still fighting for this city's future

Manchester council is having to make £109m of cuts after the government slashed its funding by 21 per cent. Council leader Sir Richard Leese explains how decisions were made – and says attacks on supposed town hall ‘waste’ are a politically-motivated red herring ...

Since I was first elected to the council almost 27 years ago, I have seen many difficult times – and, in the 1980s and 1990s, more than my fair share of budget cuts. Just weeks after becoming council leader in 1996, I had to deal with the aftermath of the IRA bomb.

But nothing has been as difficult or as painful as the struggle we have been having over the last two months to produce a legal, balanced budget in response to the biggest government spending cuts this city has had to face in living memory.

Let’s be clear: the council always knew it would have to make cuts in spending, whoever won the election.

We had already saved £55m over the last two years – largely through a procurement operation which is now so efficient that, since 2008, we have had the lead role in developing local authority purchasing across the north west.

We were already planning to make a further £96m in efficiency savings over a three-year period, this time by transforming services: establishing a shared service centre and a single customer service centre, massively reducing the amount of building space we occupy, using technology better, and working with other local authorities. For example, Manchester is now working with all the other nine Greater Manchester councils to get cost-effective adult-care placements.

If all councils across the country had shared the same average cut in grants, we might have needed to accelerate this efficiencies programme – but we would not have been facing our current crisis, and certainly wouldn’t be forced to look at closing services.

Councillors across the country, from all parties, have been shocked by the speed and severity of the cuts the coalition is imposing on local government. When Manchester received its provisional grant settlement in the middle of December, that three-year, £96m efficiency programme suddenly became a £109m cut in year one, rising to £170m the following year.

Far from getting a ‘fair’ share of cuts, Manchester – one of the most deprived council areas in the country – received one of the five worst grant settlements.

Approximately £30m has been taken from us and given to more affluent areas, largely in the south.

Some £12.6m – 35 per cent – was cut from Supporting People, and £8m was taken off the early-intervention grant that funds Sure Start.

Since the provisional settlement, I – along with members of the council executive and senior officers – have spent many long days with more than a few sleepless nights going through the budget line-by-line, trying to make sense of the appalling position we have been put in.

We have also tried to be as open and transparent with the people of the city as we can – and that’s why we have been subject to an unprecedented onslaught from government ministers and the right-wing press.

Ministers have tried to claim that councils don’t have to cut front-line services – a position refuted by the Conservative chair of the Local

Government Association (LGA) and ridiculed by LGA’s Liberal Democrat group leader.

Ministers are trying to pretend that a few efficiencies and a few pounds shaved off the chief executive’s salary are all we need to get by.

The reality is that Manchester’s story is being repeated up and down the country in councils of every political complexion.

If there is any political motivation here, it is of the Conservative/Liberal Democrat government cutting too fast and too deep, with local services having to bear the brunt of the cuts.

I understand that people who see valued services disappearing are angry. I share their anger and frustration and want them to join us in campaigning for a fair deal for Manchester.

We are doing everything we can to avoid front-line services being cut. Management costs are being cut by 41 per cent and support costs by a similar amount. We are looking to increase income.

We are looking at other providers taking over services like Sure Start and school crossing patrols, as a way of keeping them going.

But the scale of the cuts means the choices we have are very limited.

The right-wing media has published largely inaccurate lists of where they claim we are wasting money, including so called ‘non-jobs’.

Even if the lists of these jobs was accurate – which it isn’t – it doesn’t even reach one per cent of the total we have to find. What they’re really doing is supporting their government in trying to hide the true scale of what they are doing.

Some commentators have suggested we should simply give up. I reject that view. As councillors we were elected for bad times as well as good.

We need to not only deal with the immediate financial devastation but also continue to ensure that we invest in the economic and social future of this great city.

Our budget proposals contain resources that will continue to support economic growth, and that will deal with our most difficult, troublesome and complex families.

If we don’t do that, then we will face even greater problems in the future.

I have talked about this budget as ‘unmitigated misery’. That’s true. But I also believe that Manchester people have the economic and social resilience to get through this crisis and come out even stronger.

Recently Published

Community campaigners demonstrated inside Manchester town hall after watching councillors rubber-stamp a budget which includes £109m of savings this year, rising to £170m next year. Labour and Liberal Democrat members clashed over the details of the cuts as around 80 protesters in the public gallery shouted and heckled both sides and accused them of doing ‘Tory dirty work.’

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Senior management at Manchester council will be ‘significantly reduced’ under plans to axe 2,000 town-hall jobs. The council's executive is meeting this morning to rubber-stamp its proposed redundancy proposals - we have live coverage from the meeting at 10am.

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